Feature > Poetry

C.K. Williams

C. K. Williams has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. His most recent book of poems, Wait, was published in 2010, as was a prose study, On Whitman. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Cancer

Does it really all come down to the woman in the dry-cleaner's who by her

vociferous silence
and the way she flings them down let's me know she's espied the indelible

yellow driblets

on the lining of my pants and hates me for them, thrusting them with loathing

into their plastic
and not looking for an instant at my eyes, my face?And for this that she

won't accept money

directly from my hand, making clear I'm to leave my filthy bill in the dent of

the plastic tray,
that the change will be deposited there for my polluted, contagious fingers to

extract?

Was it for this, this, becoming a patient, transformed to a shivering sack of

blood to be spilled?
And the dark night tracing of malevolent lymph tracks, fear scaling the ice-

rungs of my spine?

For this the surgeon's blade slicing the fat of my gut, leaving that dismal shelf

over my groin?
And the pain, the shuddering post-operative chill, the potassium burningly

blown into my veins?

...But listen to me, complaining: who cares if some snob-bitch turns up her

nose at my crotch?
And you, cancer-fiend, still maybe spitting cells out into my bones and my

brain, fuck you:

fuck you for Zweig, fuck you for Fagles, fuck you for McGrew and Minghella

and the poets
Cavafy and both Hughes, and Ginsberg and Clifton and Jane Kenyon and even

John Donne,

plus all the big public deals like Bogart and Marley and that Beatle, and also

the beautiful starlet
who wouldn't let them cut off her perfect breasts and so died of the fear of

losing her beauty.

Too late for me to be frightened of losing my pot-bellied unbeauty, or anything

else except maybe things
like remembering when Erv Goffman was dying and I said, "What will I do

with only one super-ego?"

and he laughed, and I laughed, and what can you do, with everyone plucked

out of your life except laugh?
Or not laugh, not every day, but not cry either, or maybe a little, maybe cry

just a little, a little.

Prose

I live on prose, I devour prose, I gorge on prose till I'm ready to puke, but it's

keeping me sane:
these are the miserable months in that miserable Paris hotel in the wretched blot

of being nineteen

when I want to write poems but don't know how to begin, so I stuff prose into

the empty hours
like one of those screaming chipping machines that turn matter to mass, and I

stay more or less sane.

I also read, try to read poems, Eliot, say: I rattle around in The Wasteland and

fall on the floor.
Forget tabula rasa, I'm tabula nothing. How could anyone know this little? What

else then but prose?

Sometimes I give up even on it and drag myself out to the streets like Wyatt in

Gaddis's Recognitions,
or find myself on a bridge like Quentin in The Sound and the Fury but at least

I don't jump.

So maybe the novelists do save me, maybe Lawrence and Mann, Dickens and

Melville and Greene,
even the landslides of Thomas Wolfe that go through me like castor oil release

me from myself.

And HemingwayPapa!I slug down every word, and imagine I might be

one of his heroes, or him,
the him who could make being impotent or having your lover die sound like

the best thing in the world.

I had no idea it was his prose, the damned prose, those soldered declarative

phrases, that stoical syntax
you rode like a long-distance bus, nor that he was a shit to his friends, and

would soon do himself in.

How know either, crouched haplessly in myself like an ape in a cage and all

but tearing to pieces,
that in a blink, two blinks, I'd be all the way here, looking backand it'll be

gone, really gone,

the miles of novels, the tens of thousands of poems, read, written, not

written...Not written...
Weren’t the books not written what Hemingway died of? And that prose he

could never outgrow?

What have I left unwritten? Never outgrown? One of my grandsons when he

was four said to his mother,
“Next time Baba is little,”—Baba is me— “I’m going to read this book to him,

Mama—okay?”

Nice thought, to do it again. Maybe this time the ignorance will seem more

innocence and less curse,
and finding my way less like climbing Kilimanjaro, and more like starting your

life, sensitive, avid—all that.

Lonely Crow

My depression thank goodness isn't yet in the internet age
but still works from notebooks file cards post-its
so when Vivaldi's "Seasons" blossoms from the stereo

it doesn't know how to google junk from my drop-box
of failures and funks but blinks herky jerky like a quasar
suspending albeit accidentally the beyond myself miseries

with which it usually inflicts meyou know: war, poverty,
planet murder, power-mad politicians, the insatiable richchomp, crunch, they're eating us upbut as soon as I cut off

go up to my study my woe's back in businessenvy, greed,
absurd unquenchable ambitions, and still is at my desksigh
where I'm scrounging for poems to shake me out of myself